Unlocking Resilience and Load Balancing: Toward Hop-By-Hop Routing for LEO Mega-Constellations

We propose a fully decentralized, adaptive routing system that exploits the dynamic topology of Walker Delta Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations to achieve efficient traffic distribution and improved reliability without requiring global link-state information. The system addresses scalability challenges in mega-constellations, where congestion, limited ground infrastructure, and uneven user distribution degrade service quality in high-demand regions. Although inter-satellite links provide diverse routing paths, the lack of multibeam support in some terminals complicates routing and can increase path length during cross-plane communication. Our evaluation of a Hop-by-Hop based strategy in Walker Delta constellations shows that it achieves performance comparable to optimal congestion-minimization algorithms and outperforms source-routing methods, while maintaining near-minimal hop counts for low-latency communication.